Google Photos is getting an AI meme generator, and I love and hate the idea at the same time

Google Photos is reportedly getting a new AI-powered “Me Meme” feature that will let you insert your own face into popular meme templates, allowing you to become the dog from "This is fine" or the face of a Rickroll.

According to an APK teardown of Google Photos version 7.51.0 spotted by Android Authority, the tool will use your backed-up photos to identify a clear selfie, then automatically slot your face into well-known meme formats, essentially creating an AI-generated version of the popular website, Know Your Meme.

It's a very simple concept: pick a photo, choose a meme, and let AI do the rest. But even if it launches, and it's a polished feature, I can't help but feel that it completely misses the point of making a meme great in the first place.

We need human slop

Memes are iconic, they are one of the core pillars of the internet experience we've all grown to love, and their charm lies in their imperfections.

Creating a meme on Meme Generator works best when you use a low-resolution image and don't bother to center the text properly, or when you take a totally random image and incorporate it into a meme with no effort at all.

Obviously, I've not tried Google Photos' upcoming AI meme generator yet, but if it does launch, I'm skeptical if it will be able to recreate the rough-around-the-edges style that makes a meme a meme.

Often, the best memes are cropped badly, compressed beyond belief, littered with odd fonts, and sometimes misspelled captions. It's that chaos that makes memes funny and relatable, not the perfectly polished, sterile image generation that I suspect we'll get from an AI offering.

A Gemini-powered meme generator might be able to recreate this, but until Google shows me otherwise, I'm not convinced AI can truly capture the magic of a well (badly) put-together meme.

I hate the idea, so why am I intrigued?

It is easy to see the appeal of Google’s idea. Not everyone has the time or skill to edit a meme, and being able to drop your face into a template in seconds will probably delight millions of casual users. But by automating the process, you risk removing the one thing that makes memes so powerful: their human touch.

The best memes go viral not because they are technically perfect but because they capture a feeling, whether it is frustration, absurdity, or shared stupidity, that people instantly recognise, and they connect us because they look like something we could have made ourselves.

When everything is crisp, consistent, and generated by AI, that sense of shared chaos disappears and essentially just becomes another attempt to sterilize the internet.

A meme that is too clean looks suspicious, like it has been run through a marketing department or an app designed to boost engagement. The very reason memes resonate is because they are unpredictable and a bit broken.

That said, people are already making memes with AI, and this feature might just be another light-hearted addition to Google Photos, an app that continues to impress me on a daily basis.

I might be coming at this whole idea in the wrong way, and frankly, I think I'm worried about readily available tools like this because I'm so fond of the way the internet has brought people together through stupid, human-crafted images.

If AI becomes the go-to for meme culture, it's just another creative outlet that will disappear to the power of AI slop, and I find that quite upsetting.

Yes, the internet can be a horrible place, but there are also communities of like-minded people that come together and discuss their hobbies, their work, and sometimes just nonsense. Meme culture is the epitome of the internet, and if it gets diluted by tech companies adding in more features to their AI image generators, then I think everybody loses.

Google's upcoming AI meme generator will make it easier to turn yourself into a meme, but at what cost? The best memes are unapologetically low effort, and I don't believe any artificial intelligence can (willingly) recreate that.

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